The Grown-Up Ingenue
The New York Times Magazine
by Frank Rich

Photographs by Jake Chessum Aug. 29, 2002

"She stands out as that rarely spotted species of actress to deliver both fresh glamour and mature talent."

So where has she been all our lives? By Hollywood's time line for actresses, Naomi Watts, who turns 34 this month, is already entering the second act of her career as a movie star. Her assignments during Act I included "Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering" and dubbing a mouse's voice in "Babe: Pig in the City." Now, in a leap that strains credulity even by the promiscuous standards of show-biz fables, she has five films on the way, from big studio horror ("The Ring," from the producer of "Men in Black") to Merchant Ivory lit ("Le-Divorce," adapted from Diane Johnson's novel) to art-house chic ("21 Grams," Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's follow-up to "Amores Perros"). Her co-stars have been upgraded from digitized swine to movie aristocracy on the order of Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Kate Hudson.

This change in fortune, of course, can be attributed to a single film, David Lynch's Alice-in-Hollywood corker last year, "Mulholland Drive," in which Watts played two roles. As Betty Elms, an ingénue from Deep River, Ontario, in search of her big-screen break, she was relentlessly perky in pink and more naïve then Debbie Reynolds in "Singin' in the Rain." Her indefatigable earnestness was so American that it was a shock to learn that Watts herself only immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1990's via England and Australia. More shocking was how fully her second role inverted the first: in place of the romantic Betty was Diane Selwyn, a feral Hollywood washout with a junkie's wasted pallor and fractured consciousness. There has not been a noir double act like this since Kim Novak's in Hitchcock's "Vertigo." But Novak made love to only James Stewart. Watts brought off romantic encounters of comparable emotional fire - and unorthodox eroticism - with a leathery old roué, her co-heroine (Laura Elana Harring) and, finally, herself.

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